Cybercrime costs consumers $110 billion– With findings based on self-reported experiences of more than 13,000 adults across 24 countries, the 2012 edition of the Norton Cybercrime Report calculates the direct costs associated with global consumer cybercrime at US $110 billion over the past twelve months. In the United States, it is estimated that more than 71 million people fell victim to cybercrime in the past twelve months, suffering $20.7 billion in direct financial losses.

FBI hits back at Anonymous – your claims are TOTALLY FALSE – According to the self-declared hackers, a Java exploit – so last month! – was used to penetrate an FBI agent’s laptop. The data was lying around in a CSV file on his PC desktop, from where the crooks stole it. Conspiracy theorists quickly took over. The fact that the FBI got hacked immediately faded into the background – who hasn’t been hacked lately? – and the story became why the Feds had the data in the first place.

A Beginner’s Guide to Water Cooling Your Computer – I used to think a truly high performance computer meant lots of fans and lots of noise. Then I discovered water cooling. If you really want to overclock your PC and push it to the brink of its power, water cooling is the best way to make that happen, while keeping the entire thing whisper quiet.

Desktop Wallpaper: Northern lights – The Winter Solstice is approaching, which means winter, which means cold weather and long nights. And for the kid in all of us it brings up memories of the North Pole. Imagine going to work under the colorful aurora borealis (northern lights).

AVG goes all-in with Windows 8– AVG updates its free and paid security suites with a new interface, free tech support, a much faster installation, and a new, faster way to scan your hard drive for threats.

Security:

Fake AmEx “Security Verification” phishing emails doing rounds – Malicious spam emails impersonating American Express have been hitting inboxes in the last few days, trying to make recipients open the file in the attachment. The email purports to be a notification about a “Membership Security Verification,” and warns the users that a “slight error” has been detected in their AmEx accounts. To make it right – and not loose access to their accounts in the next 48 hours – the victims are urged to download the attached HTML file and open it in a browser.

Free-press organisations targeted in malware attack – Malware hid in a message supposedly from a colleague at a sister free-press group, slipping past anti-virus in a password-protected Zip file. Nothing says it was a state-sponsored attack, but who else would bother?

FinFisher commercial spyware toolkit goes mobile – The existence of FinFisher, a commercial spyware toolkit created by UK-based Gamma Group International, has recently grabbed the attention of the general public when two security researchers from Toronto released the results of the analysis of FinSpy, a module that is part of the toolkit and gets installed on PCs. Now those same researchers – Citizen Lab security researcher Morgan Marquis-Boire and Berkley computer science doctoral candidate Bill Marczak – have received samples that proved that FinFisher also has a component that can spy on mobile users.

Cloud Security Alliance Presents Privacy Level Agreement Initiative at European Parliament – Data privacy and protection remains a major impediment to the broad adoption of Cloud services. In an effort to help Cloud Service Providers and potential Cloud customers objectively evaluate privacy standards, and to support the implementation of Art. 29 WP and EU National Data Protection Regulators recommendations on Cloud Computing, the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) launched a new Privacy Level Agreement (PLA) Working Group.

Cloud Security Alliance partners with ASTRI to further APAC cloud security INITIATIVES – Following August’s announcement of the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) selecting Singapore as its corporate headquarters, the CSA today signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Hong Kong Applied Science and Technology Research Institute (ASTRI) to advance cloud computing security and build capabilities that will accelerate the development of the cloud ecosystem in Hong Kong. According to the agreement, the CSA and ASTRI will collaborate on applied cloud security research in order to more effectively integrate industry and academia efforts into a joint framework that fosters trusted cloud computing initiatives in Hong Kong and the Greater China region.

Webopedia Daily:

Cloud Hosting – Hosting services that are provided to customers via multiple connected servers that comprise a cloud, as opposed to being provided by a single server or virtual server. While security and lack of full control of data are the most frequently cited concerns with cloud hosting, there are numerous benefits possible with cloud hosting, including increased reliability and accessibility, seamless scalability and cost efficiency. Cloud hosting is also sometimes referred to as server on-demand hosting, cloud server hosting or cluster server hosting.

Today’s Quote:

“Every man is wise when attacked by a mad dog; fewer when pursued by a mad woman; only the wisest survive when attacked by a mad notion.”

– Robertson Davies

Today’s Free Downloads:

Universal Media Server 1.5.0 – Universal Media Server is a DLNA-compliant UPnP Media Server. The program streams or transcodes many different media formats with little or no configuration.

DVDFab Passkey Lite 8.0.7.2 – DVDFab Passkey is a Windows-based driver that works on-the-fly to unprotect encrypted movie DVDs and Blu-ray discs. For DVD, it removes all DVD copy protections. For Blu-ray, it removes all known AACS and BD+ copy protections, Region Code, BD-Live and UOPs.

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Daves Computer Tips
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